For many centuries, imperial examinations in many countries included written tests, oral interviews or practical demonstrations. Over the past few years, Taiwan has added students’ “learning portfolios” (學習歷程) to university admission, as institutions strive to recruit the best.
The Chinese for “learning portfolio” was borrowed from the English word “portfolio,” which means a selection of a person’s important works that displays their progress and achievements during the learning process.
In the 1970s, “learning portfolios” had been adopted in US elementary and secondary schools for academic and career counseling, focusing on evaluating students’ learning process, rather than being an assessment tool.
Originally, the purpose of the process was for students to think, plan, organize and give feedback when collecting and selecting their top work. From such portfolios, teachers and counselors can understand the process of students’ academic performance and progress, and provide meaningful feedback to assist them with problem-solving or career planning.
Importantly, the focus is on the learning process of “exploration, planning, growth, reflection, problem-solving and the production of concrete results.” During the process, a student might need to adjust their course selections to improve their weaknesses and improve their “diverse learning.”
However, since the concept of portfolios crossed the ocean to Taiwan, it has become a nightmare for students and many people feel pessimistic about it.
Apart from counseling, teachers can improve teaching materials and methods, or adjust curriculum planning according to the difficulties in students’ learning portfolios. They can also assist students in their development according to their growth patterns and trends. These are the fundamentals of teaching. It is the reflection, modification or advancement during teacher-student interactions that is the true essence of portfolios.
However, Taiwan misuses portfolios by making them part of the university admissions process. Something has been lost in translation. As a result, services for composing portfolios abound, while cram school teachers provide portfolio templates. The good intentions of portfolios have been lost.
Graduate school entrance exams developed by the US-based Educational Testing Service (ETS) — such as the GRE, TOEFL and TOEIC — have become internationally recognized assessment tools for their high reliability and validity. Why can Taiwan not learn from the ETS and develop better college entrance exams, making them discriminating, reliable, valid and difficult?
There is more than 50 years of data from test questions and answers from Taiwan’s college entrance exams that could be used as a database, including a “question bank,” for testing and assessment. There is no lack of testing and assessing talent at the nation’s universities.
If the government establishes a system, it could learn from the good example of the US. Then students would no longer have to struggle with portfolios, and schools would return to normal teaching and counseling.
If Taiwan can develop a “TestGPT,” it would be more beneficial than ChatGPT in the development of tests, as well as the assessment of the appropriateness of test questions and the fairness of major tests. This is likely to benefit students, schools and education. There is no shortcut to the cultivation of talent, who need our greater care and utmost attention.
Rau Dar-chin is an honorary professor in National Taiwan University’s Department of Industrial Education.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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